Douglas Schnitzspahn

Douglas Schnitzspahn is a freelance writer and editor living in Boulder, Colorado. A native of Little Silver, New Jersey, he studied English literature at Boston University and received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where he won the Mary Rouvelas Prize in Fiction. For three summers, he studied poetics and art history at the UW Rome Center in Italy and he has traveled in Sicily, Corsica, North Africa, Greece, France, Argentina and Poland. From 1993 through 1997, he worked building trails and fighting wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service in Montana and in 2000 he worked with The Wilderness Society, American Lands, and the Sierra Club to preserve Idaho’s southwest canyonlands as a national monument.

From 2001 through 2006, Schnitzspahn worked as executive editor of Hooked on the Outdoors, winning the Katie Award for best magazine and San Francisco Honorary Publication Awards for best feature and best interview. He was also the editor of Hooked’s fishing annual and editor-in-chief of Hydrogen, a magazine covering hydrogen-fuel-cell energy. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to Outside, Outside’s Go, Men’s Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Islands, Wild Earth, High Country News, Alternative Medicine, The Big Sky Journal, The Denver Post, Backpacker, Bike, Powder, Skiing, and The Mountain Gazette. Schnitzspahn’s writing has been noted in Best American Essays 2005 and he won a fellowship in non-fiction literature from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 2003.

Schnitzspahn has also put his writing and editing skills to use in a wide array of professional and industry projects. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Elevation Outdoors, editor for the Outdoor Retailer Show Dailies, ski and backcountry editor for the SIA SnowPress Show Daily, and a reporter for SNEWS. In 2006, he edited the Outdoor Industry Association’s Active Outdoor Recreation Report, a publication meant to educate politicians and policy makers on the $730-billlion economic impact of healthy outdoor recreation. He contracted with Radar Communications from 2006-2007 and currently performs contract work for Category One, conducting field research and offering brand consultation for major corporations including Sprint, Levi’s, Starbucks, and The Big Green Rabbit. In 2007, he co-founded Sustainabler.com, an e-commerce and online community site with a mission to make green solutions easy and accessible to busy people.